Banished

My body betrayed me last month, trapping me in my bed when it wasn’t sending me rushing to my poor, overworked loo. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t work and so I turned to management games to take my mind off the virus squatting inside me. Juggling budgets, disasters and production chains might not sound particularly relaxing, but there’s also a swathe of low-pressure sims that…

Tagged with feature, Banished, Cities: Skylines, Frostpunk, Megaquarium, Parkasaurus, Planet Coaster, Reigns, Reigns: Game of Thrones, Reigns: Her Majesty, Stardew Valley, Surviving Mars.

Base-building is de rigueur these days, what with all those survival games, Minecraft, Fallout 4 and now Fortnite, but before all that we had tiny top-down or isometric worlds in which we diligently built cities and dungeons and theme parks and rail networks. The central appeal of management games was and is that they give us an idealised sense of what it is like to…

Tagged with Anno 1404, best games, best management games, bestest games, Championship Manager: Season 01/02, Dawn of Discovery, feature, management games, Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, Rollercoaster Tycoon, RPS Recommended, rps-ultromegafeature, The Settlers II, Transport Tycoon, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, Zeus + Poseidon, Zeus: Master Of Olympus, Banished, Cities: Skylines, Dungeon Keeper, Dwarf Fortress, Evil Genius, Factorio, Frostpunk, Planet Coaster, Prison Architect, RimWorld, Stardew Valley, Startopia, Surviving Mars, The Sims 2, Tropico 5.

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. I got my arse kicked by the readership when I reviewed Banished and made it clear I didn't enjoy myself at all. I don't mind. I'm glad.

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Banished.

Every Moday we send Brendan to plough the fields of early access and see if anything nutritious grows. This week he mismanages a settlement of brow-beaten farm workers in Forest Village [official site], a placid spin-off from Life Is Feudal’s medieval sandbox. The village of Scallyminster lies in ruins. I’d like to think I did everything in my power to help the last citizens of…

Tagged with feature, Forest Village, Life is Feudal, Mindillusion, Premature Evaluation, Banished, Life Is Feudal: Forest Village.

Nothing says “weekend” like an afternoon spent watching a Malcolm in the Middle rerun marathon. It’s genuinely better than I remembered, but that may hold true for anything that has been viewed in order. Between you and me, though, the sitcom is best viewed as a preview to Breaking Bad. So many gas masks. So much angst. So many narrative possibilities. Anyway, pickings remain slim…

Tagged with features, The RPS Bargain Bucket, Banished, Massive Chalice, The Wolf Among Us.